DuPont knew their product would create a problem. - Attack of the Killer Fungus

For twenty years, farmers in the area had used the pesticide Benlate to ward off fungus. Although the region's generally warm and dry growing season had usually kept fungal disease in check, the DuPont salesman had advised growers to spray anyway -- as "insurance."  

[ Benlate does more harm ] * [ DuPont Knows Dangers ]

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Subject:    The Attack of the killer fungus
 Date:        Thu, 22 Mar 2001 08:38:23 -0500
From:        Stephen Tvedten <steve@getipm.com>
Organization:     Get Set Inc. (www.getipm.com)

To:     Paul Helliker <phelliker@cdpr.ca.gov>
          Director, State of California, Department of Pesticide Regulation 

cc:    Christine Whitman whitman.christine@epa.gov

Dear Mr. Helliker, I thought you might like to read an article found at: http://www.nrdc.org/amicus .

The Amicus Journal: Winter 2001: Feature Story
The Attack of the killer fungus
Gummy stem blight never really caused a problem in Texas melon fields.
But farmers sprayed for it anyway -- just in case.
Then one day, they found they'd created a monster...

By John A. Mitchell
When red blisters began appearing on their melons in the spring of 1997, baffled Texas farmers in the lower Rio Grande Valley called in plant pathologists. The diagnosis: Didymella bryoniae, a fungal disease commonly known as gummy stem blight. The news came as a shock.

For twenty years, farmers in the area had used the pesticide Benlate to ward off fungus. Although the region's generally warm and dry growing season had usually kept fungal disease in check, the DuPont salesman had advised growers to spray anyway -- as "insurance."

But during that cold, rainy spring in 1997, the insurance failed. Despite repeated applications of Benlate, blisters broke out on the fruit and leaves shriveled and browned, as gummy stem blight took its toll on thousands of acres of melon and cantaloupe fields. The fungus, it turned out, was resistant to the pesticide that was supposed to kill it. In the end, produce companies in the region lost 68 percent of the melon crop that year. Outraged growers took the pesticide company to court.

This June, a Texas jury ordered DuPont to pay $100.3 million to two fruit companies, Starr Produce Company, and Elmore and Stahl Inc., for their crop losses. DuPont is appealing the judgment and says the farmers ignored the company's recommendations for use. DuPont spokesman Mike Ricciuto also claims that the corporation was persecuted in a region of Texas where juries are notoriously unfriendly to large companies. But during the trial, the plaintiffs' attorneys unearthed a memo from a DuPont salesman showing that the company had known about gummy stem blight's resistance to Benlate since 1994.

"We will see more liability if pesticide manufacturers such as DuPont act as Firestone did with its tires -- they know there is a problem, but until it becomes uneconomical, they continue to sell it," says Robert C. Scott, an attorney for the plaintiffs. Scott is representing four more Rio Grande Valley produce companies in lawsuits against DuPont scheduled to go to trial in December.

The historic response to pesticide resistance in U.S. agriculture has been to use more toxins, which has only magnified the resistance problem and created an exuberant, expensive chemical dependency. Pesticide use in the United States increased tenfold from 1945 through 1989. During the same period, the number of insect pests resistant to pesticides increased, and crop losses nearly doubled, from 7 to 13 percent, according to a report issued last year by the Pesticide Action Network. (Does this report make you proud, Mr. Helliker?)

Resistance forms when selection pressure is put on an organism and it changes in response, explains Lynn Brandenberger, a horticulturist with the Texas agricultural extension service. "When you apply pressure [in this instance, the pesticide Benlate], the pathogen population begins to shift genetic direction to get around it," says Brandenberger, who worked closely with the farmers in the afflicted area in 1997. "Overuse leads to resistance developing more quickly."

At Starr Produce Company's 15,000-acre farm, spraying in 1997 began even before the first symptoms appeared and continued through the harvest. Or what would have been the harvest. By then, an estimated $6 million worth of melons had been lost.

Tom Isakeit, a plant pathologist at Texas A&M University who identified the pathogen as gummy stem blight, checked for resistance to benomyl, the active ingredient in Benlate. More than 90 percent of the samples were highly resistant. "Sometimes you just up the dose and that helps for a little while. In this case, that wouldn't have worked at all," Isakeit says.

Once resistance develops there isn't always a solution, chemical or otherwise. "About a decade ago, the Colorado potato beetle evolved resistance to everything we had," says David Andow, an entomologist at the University of Minnesota. "Farmers had to stop growing potatoes in several major production areas. And then one chemical company came up with a new chemical that everybody is using now. It's really just a matter of time before resistance to that will start appearing."

One solution environmentalists have long advocated is integrated pest management (IPM), a system that reduces pesticide use without requiring farmers to go entirely organic. IPM calls for using all the biological controls available -- crop rotation, predatory insects, and the like -- and reserving the chemicals as a last resort. Even then, a farmer sprays only when pests threaten to shrink profits too much; spraying for "insurance" is out of the question. But IPM tactics differ, depending on who's talking. There is currently a battle going on for the heart of IPM: pesticide manufacturers are promoting their own chemical-intensive model.

Richard Wiles, research director at the Environmental Working Group (EWG), has sympathy for farmers caught in the cycle of pesticide resistance, but only up to a point. "The farmers are victims of an incredible propaganda campaign by the pesticide industry, but they are sort of willing victims. Alternatives are out there, but if you don't have the initiative, then you just keep doing the same thing," Wiles says. "They are using chemicals instead of their heads. It's a lot harder to think your way through less chemical use."

But pests can develop resistance even to non-chemical control measures. For instance, even crop rotation, a fairly simple pest-control approach, can become ineffective, says entomologist Ann Sorenson, research director of the American Farmland Trust's Center for Agriculture and the Environment. "Here in the Midwest, for years we told farmers to rotate corn and soybeans to control corn rootworms," says Sorenson. "The rotations are no longer working because of a behavioral change in the insect." Female corn rootworm moths had generally laid their eggs in corn roots, so that their larvae had a supply of ready food the next spring when the corn was sowed. But now that crop rotation is common, most female corn rootworms are fluttering out of the cornfields to adjacent soybean or alfalfa fields -- which are usually seeded to corn the next year.

Isakeit, the Texas A&M pathologist, is optimistic about new chemicals being developed that are designed to debilitate only one or a few organs of a target pest. The hope is that their narrow range of effect will make them less toxic to other life-forms than the old broad-spectrum poisons such as DDT. But environmentalists caution that this approach could further accelerate the use of pesticides. In Richard Wiles's view, it creates incentives for chemical companies to develop and introduce an ever-widening arsenal of pesticides, which may have unknown synergistic effects. And as toxic chemicals are lathered over agricultural products in greater and greater amounts, it's the consumer who ends up bearing the brunt of rising production costs -- and health risks.

DuPont has changed the Benlate label since 1997 so that the product can no longer be used on gummy stem blight. But in general, as Rachel Carson wrote in Silent Spring, chemical manufacturers are "understandably loath" to confront the problem of pesticide resistance. With measured understatement, she listed the "unpleasant economic facts" of pests' immunity to chemicals: the ever-increasing costs of insect control as more and more poison is required; the inability to plan ahead because today's promising toxin could be a dismal failure tomorrow; and the loss of costly research and development when "insects prove once more that the effective approach to nature is not through brute force." As Carson observed nearly forty years ago, however rapidly technology advances, the insects seem to keep a lap ahead.

John A. Mitchell (jmitc1014@aol.com) is an environmental reporter.

The Amicus Journal. Winter 2001  
Copyright 2001 by the Natural Resources Defense Council

Well Mr. Helliker, The above is just one more article that proves your dangerous, "registered' POISONS do not even control pest problems but, instead they create more pest damages, ever increasing resistance, higher production costs and increased health risks.  All of your "registered" POISONS combined over the last 50+ years have never controlled much less eliminated even one pest species/problem.  Every study or field trial I have ever conducted has consistently proven that (unregistered) alternatives are not only safer but far more effective in reducing pests, expenses, contamination and dangers!  When will it be "legal" (in your opinion) to use safe and far more effective (unregistered) alternatives to actually control pest problems in California?.

Respectfully, Stephen L. Tvedten

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